Microsoft Circles the Wagons To Defeat ODF In the UK 89
Andy Updegrove writes "Three weeks ago, we heard that Francis Maude, a senior UK government minister, was predicting the conversion to open source office suites by UK government agencies. Lost in the translation in many stories was the fact that this was based not on an adopted policy, but on a proposal still open for public comment — and subject to change. It should be no surprise that Microsoft is trying to get the UK to add OOXML, its own format standard, to the UK policy. Why? According to a messaging sent to its UK partners, because it believes that a failure to include OOXML 'will cause problems for citizens and businesses who use office suites which don't support ODF, including many people who do not use a recent version of Microsoft Office or, for example, Pages on iOS and even Google Docs.' Of course, that's because Microsoft pushed OOXML as an alternative to ODF a decade ago. If you don't want the same objection to be valid a decade from now, consider making your views known at the Cabinet Office Standards Hub. The deadline is February 26."
Re:OOXML not included in old Office either (Score:5, Informative)
Open government = open standards (Score:2, Informative)
All software utilized by the government ought to be open source as a natural consequence of the source of the funds used to support it. Everyone should benefit from the government's use of technology, not just Microsoft.
Re:'will cause problems...don't support ODF, (Score:4, Informative)
(it'll replace all the bullets in a list with a clock icon, regardless of what font we use).
Irony. I think most of the clocks I've seen were in genuine 100% Microsoft Word.
However, I think I recognize your problem and it has to do (IIRC) with the fact that the font used for the bullet is not controlled by the font specification for the bulleted content itself, and I'm pretty sure that there is actually a difference between Word's handling of this nuance and Open/Libre Office handling of it.
If that was the worst problem I had, I think a fairly simple solution could be achieved, but my definition of "fairly simple" can run up to and including unzipping the ODF and doing a "sed" replace, so your definition may vary.
Re:OOXML not included in old Office either (Score:2, Informative)
>.docx which is OOXML.
No it isn't. this was known back when they pushed for OOXML to be a standard. they do not meet the standard for OOXML and are therefore NOT OOXML
Re:OOXML not included in old Office either (Score:5, Informative)
Not so. docx ~= ooxml, but there's not a single piece of software on the planet that supports OOXML as approved by purchased standards bodies. And that assumes you even grant the title "standard" to the obfuscated mess that is OOXML, where many parts of the "standard" refer to binary blobs stored in "the format used by MS Office" without any further detail.